Wednesday, March 9, 2011

"How To Train Your Dragon" Party: Part 1, Invitations

E is turning five soon! Normally birthday parties at our house are low-key; family, maybe one or two other couples and their kids, dinner, balloons, gifts, and a special cake. With a limited budget and a teensy house, it's the way things are done. But I decided this year, since five is kind of a big deal, I was going to plan a nice big bash for my boy!

Okay, I admit, it's for me too. I LOVE theme parties, and I LOVE watching my boys with their friends having a great time! I was mulling over what kind of theme to choose when I saw this post by Stacey over at Boy, oh Boy, oh Boy! She threw a "How to Train Your Dragon" party for her boy, and i was totally inspired! That's my boys' favorite movie EVER (it's high on my list too!), so it would be perfect! I ran the idea past E and he was so excited! Even more so when i told him he could have more than two friends over.

I'm kind of going my own way with it to work with my own skills and what i have available to me, but I'll be using a few of her ideas. And hopefully we can both be inspiring to you!

First come the invitations!

I don't have pictures for the first step, which was tea-staining some cardstock. it would have been nice to use regular antique-y colored cardstock, but i didn't have any, nor did i have the money to go out and buy some. so, some of my bright white cardstock got a bath. If you don't know about tea-staining, it's just like it sounds: make some tea, then use a brush (or in my case, a painting sponge) and paint the paper all over with the tea. I don't drink actual tea leaves, but i had some peppermint herbal tea laying around, and after steeping it until it was good and dark, it worked quite well as a stain.

While the paper dried, i used my trusty old PC to design the invites.

I did a google search to find promo pictures from the movie that i could use. The fonts i used are "DS Rune English" and "Cup and Talon". I downloaded them forever ago, but i believe they both came from DaFont.

Then I printed them off on the now dry tea-stained cardstock, and cut out the individual invites.

note: I had to iron down the paper, as the tea-stain made it rather bumpy. It could have just been the way i dried it. If this happens to you, a couple seconds under an iron on high (no steam) will flatten them out in no time.Otherwise, you're bound to end up with something like this:

After folding them all up, i carefully burned the edges with a candle. Okay, i probably could have burned them a little more carefully. I had to wet my fingers and dab the edges once they were burned enough, because even when i blew out the flame, the cardstock just kept burning!